Undoubtedly, many businesses, organizations, enterprises, and other entities rely heavily on computer networks as part of their business functions and operations. For example, a large number of businesses conduct commerce over these networks by advertising, selling, and otherwise communicating with third parties. Such networks can involve both trusted and untrusted networks and systems. As such, businesses, particularly large ones, routinely make substantial investments in network security to ensure that their information (which may include sensitive financial and/or personal data) is protected.
All of the legitimate uses of computer networking come with the perils associated with the potential to abuse access to a computer network, both from users within the network and from third parties outside of the network. Such abuse can take a variety of forms, including, for instance, attempts by third parties to disable computer resources (“denial of service attacks”), to misappropriate confidential information, to improperly use computer resources, to infect computers with viruses or other malware, or to send unwanted email (“spam”). Users from within a network can exploit their network privileges to gain access to websites (e.g. audio streaming) unrelated to the legitimate uses of their accounts. These security compromises exact a heavy burden in terms of costs to organizations. Moreover, as the number of users increases, and thus, the network is scaled up accordingly, the security concerns and costs are even greater in that most security solutions do not scale well. That is, as network components are acquired to service the new users, so too are the necessary security software/hardware. Furthermore, new network security threats and attacks are continually encountered, thereby requiring organizations to periodically update their security infrastructures.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that can efficiently and effectively provide scalable, on-demand computer network security services.